14 DAY TRIAL // The Greenlight service for Steam has been widely praised for its effect on indie game development and distribution, but the team at Valve working on it admits that it still has some problems that are currently being worked on.
Tom Bui, a developer working on the Steam digital distribution service at Valve, is quoted by Indiestatik as saying that, “A lot of the changes we’ve been making are not that visible to those outside the system but what we’re basically trying to do is automate a lot of our processes and putting tools into the hands of the developers, instead of having a to have a team of people on our side to do things.”
Apparently, before Greenlight was introduced, actual fax machines were still used at Valve in order to access submissions from developers.
Valve has already said that it wants to deliver more titles to players and until it increases its distribution capabilities, Greenlight is a good way to select the games that the community is eager to play.
Bui adds, “It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and has a bunch of downsides (even with its failing, it is much better than our old, opaque system). We are making improvements to Greenlight where we can, but right now we are focusing on what we can do to ship more games.”
Some developers are criticizing the Greenlight system because the criteria used for game selection are not transparent enough.
Indie games are at the moment also courted by Microsoft and Sony as they try to create a large potential audience for the coming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One home consoles.
However, most small developers are committed to launching their games on the PC because the launch and the update process seem to be easier than on other gaming devices.